These young women
were asserting an intersectional identity that is easily recognized by many of
their millennial generation peers but unfamiliar to many others: after years of
debate within the Latino community they became emblematic of “Latinx,” a new
identifying label that is rapidly taking hold among millennials, Latino activists
and advocacy groups, and academics.

In a political
climate marred by the continuing ascendance of authoritarian, nativist politics
embodied by the Trump presidency, Latinx may be able to create a wealth of
political capital by embracing a fluid, multiracial and multicultural identity.
And this might stimulate a more effective reaction to Trumpian rhetoric which uses
the phrase “America First” as a code to further anti-immigrant scapegoating, reaching
sordid new lows with the separation
and detention of over 12,000 immigrant children from their families in 2018.

The advent of the term Latinx is the most
recent iteration of a naming debate that is grounded in the politics of race
and ethnicity. For several decades the term ‘Latino’ was the progressive choice
over the European-ethnic sounding ‘Hispanic,’ carrying with it the notion that
Latin American migrants to the United States were not merely hyphenated
Europeans but products of mixed-race societies and cultures.

Still, as Latino became the preferred
choice of those who wanted to identify as multiracial, gender politics quickly
emerged in the politics of labeling. As racial identity began intersecting with
gender and sexual preference, Latino became ‘Latino/a,’ then ‘Latina/o’ to move
the ‘o’ out of its privileged position. After the universalization of digital
communication it briefly became ‘Latin@.’

In the last few years the term Latinx has
become popular among members of the LGBTQ community who wanted to dispense with
gender identifiers in language—as witness the now-ubiquitous millennial
practice of posting pronouns to be used when referring to an individual like ‘she/her,’
‘him/her’ and ‘they/them.’

When many of us first see the word in
print, Latinx can seem strange and unpronounceable, but after closer inspection
it appears liberating and futurist. Just as identifying as Latino represented
an attempt to defy America’s black/white racial binary, Latinx defies
conventional gender conformity by defying the male/female gender binary. As far
as I know, Latinx is the first attempt by a racial and/or ethnic group to make
a statement about emerging issues of gender identification.

When political figures like Ocasio Cortez,
González, and other emerging candidates like Julia
Salazar openly tout their multiple identifications alongside progressive
policies, they are representing a new form of intersectional politics (Salazar
recently won her Democratic Primary for State Senator in New York and
identifies as Colombian and Jewish, though not without controversy). Pioneered
by African American feminist projects led by the Cohambee
River Collective in the 1970s and coined by legal scholarKimberlé
Williams Crenshaw as well as the
Chicana “border thinking” feminism of Gloria Anzadúa
and Cherrie Moraga,
intersectionalism seems like a fitting antidote to a political landscape in
crisis over the conflict between neoliberalism and nativist authoritarianism.

Even before the ascension of Trump,
community organizers and street demonstrations were trying to promote a message
that Black Lives Matter, the Women’s Movement and the Sanctuary Cities movement
to protect the rights of the undocumented were intersecting causes that should
be joined together. So it wasn’t that much of a surprise that the
demonstrations that were held at JFK airport in early 2017 against Trump’s
Muslim Travel Ban were organized by a coalition of Jewish and Muslim groups and
featured a multiracial cross-section of New Yorkers.

For Latin American descendants,
multiracial identity is, to varying degrees, ‘cooked into’ their varying
national cultures. Raza, the Spanish
word for race, is often used to designate a collective identity that is itself
a mixture of races. Prominent Mexican scholar José Vasconcelos’
essay La Raza Cósmicatried
to celebrate mixture as a path to transcendence beyond racism, but in many ways
it only served to privilege European identity at the expense of indigenous
culture.

For many Latinx in the US, the harsh
reality of the black-white racial binary they confront as immigrants is a
wake-up call that in many cases reinforces their solidarity with their roots as
marginalized people. This was manifested most clearly in the 1970s among Puerto
Rican migrants in New York, whose embrace of African roots informed cultural
and political movements, and in the West, where Mexican Americans came to
identify as ‘Chicanos,’ a name derived from their indigenous ancestors in
Mexico and the Southwestern USA.

While dormant for much of the last 30
years, these new multicultural and intersectional forms of identity are gaining
in prominence, and they represent a kind of synergy between people of color and
white millennials whose dampened economic prospects have led them to embrace
class politics. Much of Ocasio Cortez and Salazar’s support comes from
neighborhoods in Queens with an increasing millennial demographic. The two
women are both members of Democratic
Socialists of America, a group favored by politically-aware millennials
which stresses class politics and socialist solutions to social problems.

Yet the case of Latinx also argues against
the supposed dichotomy between class-based politics and so-called identity
politics. Much of the debate among progressives following the Trump election
centered on whether Republicans were more successful in appealing to
class-based politics through their critiques of free trade agreements and the
loss of jobs overseas, as opposed to the Democrats’ perceived focus on identity
politics rooted in Obama’s victory. Latinx and other marginalized groups are
large constituencies that are affected by growing global inequality as much as,
if not more than, the white working class.

“Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office,” says Ocasio-Cortez
in her now-famous
campaign video depicting her ties to working-class Bronx. “I wasn’t born to
a wealthy or powerful family. I was born in a place where your zip code
determines your destiny.” For all
of the critique recently leveled at her for posing in an Interview magazine photo shoot wearing
thousands of dollars of designer clothing, Ocasio-Cortez is practicing the
politics of recognition. She is asking to be recognized, not only as a woman of
color—the object of both racial and
sexual discrimination—but also as part of the struggling 99 per cent: central
to her platform is an increase in the minimum wage, universal health care,
affordable housing, criminal justice reform, immigration reform, confronting
climate change and campaign-finance reform.

It's this politics of recognition that Francis Fukuyama
attacks in his new book, Identity: The Demand for
Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. For Fukuyama, the claim to
difference, whether it’s Black Lives Matter, gay marriage, Osama Bin Laden or
Vladimir Putin, is the ultimate threat to the new liberal order established by
the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. For him, this form of identity politics
is a kind of misplaced passion somewhere between desire and reason.

Latinx does represent something in between, a way of
thinking that moves in and around borders, but on that journey it retains
memories and moments of everywhere it travels. It’s a politics of recognition
that not only brings to light the unrepresented and the marginalized, but also sees
many forms of marginalization existing in one person. For that reason, the new
politics it represents, defined by mulitiracial and multicultural awareness and
inclusive of gender difference, is not the end of history but a new beginning.

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